Currently, customers of a broad spectrum of service providers must spend a significant portion of their productive day, skipping hours of work, waiting for scheduled appointments. Customers are often required to take off a full day's work in order to be at home for a 30-minute telephone or cable technician visit. Appointments of this type are often scheduled within a 4-8 hour window, during which the customer has no way of knowing when exactly the service provider's personnel will arrive. This is a source of serious customer aggravation and damage to customer relations.
Service provider personnel, on the other hand (whether delivery personnel, technicians or doctors), waste productive time on inefficient scheduling, missed appointments or late customers. For example, cable technicians often arrive at the customer's door to respond to a problem reported by the customer only to learn that the visit is no longer needed, because the problem “fixed itself.” Also, when a customer misses an appointment, such as doctor's appointment, i.e. a “no-show” customer, the service provider looses revenue from the no-show customer, and also has inconvenienced other customers that may have desired to utilize the services during the time of the missed appointment. Likewise, when a customer is late for an appointment, the service provider is often required to shuffle their appointment calendar to accommodate the late customer by rescheduling other customers to accommodate the late customer.
Accordingly, a system and method for dynamically managing, monitoring and scheduling customer appointments is needed.